It's been a long time.
She sees him and drops her bag. He looks down, covering his eyes with his hat reflexively.
"Hey, Mist."
She snaps back to reality and finds her face is warm. She scowls in an effort to cover up, but he's avoiding looking at her anyway.
"Eight years and all you have to say is 'Hey, Mist?'"
But then her body moves by itself and she's hugging him. He looks down at her – since when is he taller than me?- and then he's hugging her back, and she breathes in his scent: trainer and leather and man, because she realizes that he's not a boy anymore.
Is she a woman?
They release each other, finally. She'd swear later that her greeting was simply a fist bump, high five, or nod depending on the retelling. And he'd flash that irritating smile in her direction, and she would threaten to kill him thirty different ways, and it would be like old times.
So she didn't regret hugging him, even though he was Ash and she was Misty and they didn't just hug. Because she had missed him.
And in that hug, when his fingers gripped her just as tightly as hers gripped him, she knew he had missed her too.
